Bedsides myself, you are one of the few people in these forums that I have seen who use or possibly (hopefully) understand Amazon S3. You will also find there is virtually no good documentation on the built-in S3 functionality, and as far as tech support … good luck with that because they know virtually nothing about S3 and since there is no real screen help/documentation, there is nothing for them to parrot back to you when you call them.
I have been using S3 for several years on different NAS and certain servers (Linux, Windows Server, etc.) so I will share what I have learned from painful trial and error on the MyCloud2.
There are five screens you need to complete to configure an S3 job.
First screen – The job name, which is the same name of the top level directory the built in S3 will use when it uploads to your bucket, so choose wisely.
The second screen - When you create your S3 job, make sure you select the correct S3 region for your corresponding account. Even though Amazon would rather people create/use an IAM user account, I use the AWS Secret Access Key method. For the remote path, use the bucket name. I think I tried using a fully qualified path name awhile back but said screw it and used the bucket name.
Third Screen - Now comes the real garbage part, here you choose the Type and Backup Type, of course, there is no onscreen help/notes/documentation so it’s all trial and error here. Originally I tried making incremental backups using the Incremental Backup Type, but that didn’t seem to work well for me and I still wanted to only backup/copy files that have changed since the last S3 backup. So I ended up selecting Upload as my Type and Overwrite Existing File(s) as my Backup Type (I’m thinking what clown at WD chose that description because it doesn’t tell you if this is an incremental backup, full back up, whatever). Well after running this for a few weeks, the backup type “Overwrite Existing File(s)” seems to be working as an incremental backup solution but the good part is that it does not create a “new file” each time a file has changed, it overwrites the previous file of the same name.
The rest of the configuration screens are relatively straight forward. The fourth screen allows you to select sub folders for back up, it’s not super flexible (e.g., you may have to create multiple jobs to backup certain folders because of the parent/child folder relationship.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, I was having trouble using the Edge browser when creating an S3 job, here is that post.
